The Aberdeen Group study concluded that best-in-class organizations balanced their approach to search engine marketing, unlike the average or laggard organizations who were found to be more likely to give search engine marketing an unbridled budget with little or no connection to the rest of their organization. Best-in-class organizations succeed because their view of search engine marketing, itself composed of paid search, paid advertising, and organic search, is best employed in conjunction with other capabilities such as organizational structure, knowledge management, and performance management. The report further specified that success in the relationship between these capabilities is dependant to some degree on employing technologies.

The Aberdeen Group performed a competitive assessment of the capability of performance management and found that the three business levels identified in the study (best-in-class, average, and laggard) shared common performance levels that could be broken down to five categories: process; organization; knowledge; technology; and performance. Each of these five categories were placed in a competitive framework and from these findings the Aberdeen Group was able to state that best-in-class organizations owe their competitive advantage to having a combination of capabilities and technological enablers. This is worth examining in further detail. In the competitive framework, the technology category clearly demonstrated that best-in-class organizations were far more efficient than their competitors in the areas of campaign management, website keyword density analysis, and customer relationship management. This is to say that SEM strategies employed by best-in-class organizations each have technologies that enable formal processes and policies for an automated closed loop marketing design.

You may recall how it was determined that best-in-class organizations owe their success to restricting SEM strategies so that they were one component in a larger corporate machine, of which marketing is one subsystem that must work with other subsystems. The findings of the Aberdeen Group’s study suggest that when technology is used to create an automated closed loop marketing regime, this enables other department to excel, for instance note the superior conversion numbers from getting qualified leads into the hands of the sales team in a timely manner. All of the facets of SEM, such as driving traffic to a properly designed website, employing the proper keywords and site structure, and effective bid management to get the right paid placement, all of these effective strategies are collectively only one part of the marketing machine. If all of these strategies do not lead to revenue conversion, the sales team is not getting the tools they require to get the job done. And according to the Aberdeen Group, getting the job done is what separates the best-in-class organizations from the rest of the pack.

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